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In 2018 a different whistleblower outed Facebook for its sketchy collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, a research organisation that allowed users’ data to be collected without their consent and used for political profiling by Donald Trump’s campaign. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, went to Washington, DC to apologise, and in 2019 America’s consumer-protection agency, the Federal Trade Commission, agreed to a $5bn settlement with Facebook. That is the largest fine ever levied against a tech firm.

Congress has repeatedly called in tech bosses for angry questioning and public shaming without taking direct action afterwards.

Senators, who cannot agree on such uncontroversial things as paying for the government’s expenses, united against a common enemy and promised Ms Haugen that they would hold Facebook to account.

Congress could update and strengthen the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which was passed in 1998 and bars the collection of data from children under the age of 13.

If Congress does follow through with legislation, it is likely to focus narrowly on protecting children online, as opposed to broader reforms, for which there is still no political consensus.

Social media’s harmful effects on children and teenagers is a concern that transcends partisanship and is easier to understand than sneaky data-gathering, viral misinformation and other social-networking sins.

Other legislative proposals take aim at manipulative marketing and design features that make social media so addictive for the young.

However, Ms Haugen’s most significant impact on big tech may be inspiring others to come forward and blow the whistle on their employers’ malfeasance.

“A case like this one opens the floodgates and will trigger hundreds more cases,” predicts Steve Kohn, a lawyer who has represented several high-profile whistleblowers.

One is the industry’s culture of flouting rules and a history of non-compliance. Another is a legal framework that makes whistleblowing less threatening and more attractive than it used to be.

The Dodd-Frank Act, which was enacted in 2010, gives greater protections to whistleblowers by preventing retaliation from employers and by offering rewards to successful cases of up to 10-30% of the money collected from sanctions against a firm.

If the threat of public shaming encourages corporate accountability, that is a good thing. But it could also make tech firms less inclusive and transparent, predicts Matt Perault, a former Facebook executive who is director of the Centre for Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

People may become less willing to share off-the-wall ideas if they worry about public leaks; companies may become less open with their staff; and executives could start including only a handful of trusted senior staff in meetings that might have otherwise been less restricted.

Facebook and other big tech firms, which have been criticised for violating people’s privacy online, can no longer count on any privacy either.

Facebook and Instagram are simply carrying on a longstanding American tradition: stoking the insecurities of teenage girls to cash in on them.

The global beauty industry generates $500 billion in annual sales, and social media is now an important driver, especially for the youngest target demographic, Gen Z.

The global weight management market was estimated at more than $260 billion in 2020, and is projected to grow to more than $400 billion by 2027.

Before American girls’ confidence was commodified by Instagram, it was at the whim of magazines filled with impossibly slender, airbrushed models and ads from industries relying on girls and women for revenue

That’s because social media is addictive. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson called it “attention alcohol,” explaining, “Like booze, social media seems to offer an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, disorientation, and, for some, dependency.”

as a student at Harvard, he put his female classmates’ photos on his now-notorious “Facemash” website, where students could rank and compare the students’ headshots based on how hot they were. He wrote at the time, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

For girls now, things have changed. They’re largely worse. Social media platforms such as Instagram feel like algorithmic free-for-alls, full of images of people who have altered how they look, whether by using online filters or in real life, with dieting, surgery or both. In the feed, influencers’ and celebrities’ photos are interspersed with photos of your friends and yourself. Now any photo is subject to scrutiny, comparison and assessment in the form of likes and comments.

No school health class or parental reassurance is a match for the might of these powerful tech platforms, combined with entire industries that prey on girls’ insecurities.

Girls themselves often know Instagram is not good for them, but they keep coming back.

At the core of this marketing, the message endures: You are riddled with flaws and imperfections. We will tell you what to buy, and what do, to fix yourself.

Ultimately, Instagram is just a vicious messenger. But the cesspool of content fueling it? That comes from us.

as the production of food and material goods centralized and rapidly expanded, commerce reached a scale that the country’s existing stores were ill-equipped to handle, according to the historian Susan Strasser, the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. Manufacturers needed ways to distribute their newly enormous outputs and educate the public on the wonder of all their novel options. Americans, in short, had to be taught how to shop.

In 2019, one in five American workers was employed in retail, food service, or hospitality; even more are now engaged in service work of some kind.

This dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that the United States has more service workers than ever before, doing more types of labor, spread thin across the economy

Customers might not have been able to afford a household staff to do their bidding like the era’s truly wealthy, but corporate stores offered them a little taste of what that would be like. The middle class began to see itself as the small-time beneficiaries of industrialization’s barons.

With these goals in mind, Leach writes, customer service was born. For retailers’ tactics to be successful, consumers—or guests, as department stores of the era took to calling them—needed to feel appreciated and rewarded

From 1870 to 1910, the number of service workers in the United States quintupled. It’s from this morass that “The customer is always right” emerged as the essential precept of American consumerism—service workers weren’t there just to ring up orders

they were there to fuss and fawn, to bolster egos, to reassure wavering buyers, to make dreams come true.

they were also quite intentionally building something far grander: class consciousness. Leach writes that the introduction of shopping was fundamental to forming middle-class identity at a particularly crucial moment, as the technological advances of the Gilded Age helped create the American office worker as we now know it.

Retailers won over this growing middle class by convincing its members that they were separate from—and opposed to—industrial workers and their distrust of corporate power,

For many of these workers, the difficulty of finding non-service employment enables companies to pay low wages and keep their prices artificially low, which consumers generally like as long as they don’t have to think about what makes it possible. In theory, these conditions are supposed to encourage better performance on the part of the worker; in practice, they also encourage cruelty on the part of the consumer.

Previously confined to a few lavish European-owned hotels in America, tipping “aristocratized consumption,

Department-store magnates alleviated these concerns by linking department stores to the public good. Retailers started inserting themselves into these communities as much as possible, Leach writes, turning their enormous stores into domains of urban civic life. They hosted free concerts and theatrical performances, offered free child care, displayed fine art, and housed restaurants, tearooms, Turkish baths, medical and dental services, banks, and post offices. They made splashy contributions to local charities and put on holiday parades and fireworks shows. This created the impression that patronizing their stores wouldn’t just be a practical transaction or an individual pleasure, but an act of benevolence toward the orderly society those stores supported.

In the 150 years that American consumerism has existed, it has metastasized into almost every way that Americans construct their identities. Today’s brands insert themselves into current events, align themselves with causes, associate patronage of their businesses with virtue and discernment and success.

Most Americans now expect corporations to take a stand on contentious social and political issues; in return, corporations have even co-opted some of the language of actual politics, encouraging consumers to “vote with their dollars” for the companies that market themselves on the values closest to their own.

For Americans in a socially isolating culture, living under an all but broken political system, the consumer realm is the place where many people can most consistently feel as though they are asserting their agency.

Being corrected by a salesperson, forgotten by a bartender, or brushed off by a flight attendant isn’t just an annoyance—for many people, it is an existential threat to their self-understanding.

“The notion that at the restaurant, you’re better than the waiters, it becomes part of the restaurant experience,” and also part of how some patrons understand their place in the world. Compounding this sense of superiority is the fact that so many service workers are from historically marginalized groups—the workforce is disproportionately nonwhite and female.

Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, Strasser said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure

If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past few decades

Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”

Tipping ratcheted up the level of control that members of the middle class could exercise over the service workers beneath them: Consumers could deny payment—effectively, deny workers their wages—for anything less than complete submission.

Modern businesses have invented novel ways to exacerbate conflicts between their customers and their workers.

A big problem at airlines and hotels in particular, Wong said, is what’s called the “customer relationship management” model. CRM programs, the first and most famous of which are frequent-flyer miles, are fabulously profitable; awarding points or miles or bucks encourages people not only to increase the size and frequency of their purchases, but also to confine their spending to one airline or hotel chain or big-box store.

Higher-spending customers access varying levels of luxury and prestige, often in full view of everyone else. Exposure to these consumer inequalities has been found to spark antisocial behavior in those who don’t get to enjoy their perks, the classic example of which is air rage

Workers must do what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart, identified as “emotional labor.”

Workers must stifle their natural emotional reactions to, in the case of those in the service industry, placate members of the consumer class. These workers are alienated from their own emotional well-being, which can have far-reaching psychological consequences—over the years, research has associated this kind of work with elevated levels of stress hormones, burnout, depression, and increased alcohol consumption.

If a less democratic world is needed to deal with the climate, who are the people who’d like to bring a less democratic world into being?

The aim is not to reach net zero faster – neither party has laid out workable plans to do so – but to endear climate-conscious voters to an ethno-nationalist cause.

It’s not just the right, however, that has considered a turn away from democracy for the planet’s sake.

As much as US and UK liberals have talked up the promise of spreading democracy throughout the world this century, though, many centrists – as the Progressive International’s David Adler wrote in 2018 – are pretty down on democracy itself. Analysing the World Values and the European Values surveys, Adler found that centrists in wealthy countries were less supportive of democracy than their counterparts on either the left or the far right. Less than half of centrists in the US thought elections were essential; only 25% saw civil rights as a critical feature of democracy.

Actually existing centrist politicians, meanwhile, such as Emmanuel Macron in France, haven’t shown any willingness to address the climate crisis at the speed or scale it demands.

Openly authoritarian governments hardly fare better. China has rolled out an impressive array of green technologies over the last decade with massive industrial policy. Yet still it continues to prioritise fossil-fuelled growth, with its 14th five-year plan pledging to reduce “emissions intensity” by just 18% through 2025, and the planned opening of 43 new coal-fuelled power stations

But India, like China, has missed the deadline to update its emissions reduction plan in advance of UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.

There is simply no class of enlightened technocrats in powerful governments waiting in the wings to save the day.

A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum,” the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor has argued, “but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.”

In the less upbeat SSP3, “resurgent nationalism” and “concerns about competitiveness and security” start to emerge as countries go their own way in trying to adapt to and (more rarely) mitigate rising temperatures.

A best-case scenario detailed in their report by IPCC scientists, Shared Socioeconomic Economic Pathway 1, involves “more inclusive development” and unprecedented collaboration among the world’s governments to manage the global commons

The best hope in the short term is for a popular front to browbeat the middling centrists who claim to “believe science” into actually acting on it, and beating back the illiberal right accordingly.

So when did the Anthropocene actually start? It is difficult to put a precise date on a transition that occurred at different times and rates in different places, but it is clear that in 1750, the Industrial Revolution had barely begun but by 1850 it had almost completely transformed England and had spread to many other countries in Europe and across the Atlantic to North America. We thus suggest that the year AD 1800 could reasonably be chosen as the beginning of the Anthropocene

The result of these and other energy-dependent processes and activities was a significant increase in the human enterprise and its imprint on the environment. Between 1800 and 2000, the human population grew from about one billion to six billion, while energy use grew by about 40-fold and economic production by 50-fold [55].

Only by 1850 did the CO 2 concentration (285 ppm) reach the upper limit of natural Holocene variability and by 1900 it had climbed to 296 ppm [58], just high enough to show a discernible human influence beyond natural variability. Since the mid-twentieth century, the rising concentration and isotopic composition of CO 2 in the atmosphere have been measured directly with great accuracy [60], and has shown an unmistakable human imprint.

The fraction of the land surface devoted to intensive human activity rose from about 10 to about 25–30% [56]

The human enterprise switched gears after World War II. Although the imprint of human activity on the global environment was, by the mid-twentieth century, clearly discernible beyond the pattern of Holocene variability in several important ways, the rate at which that imprint was growing increased sharply at midcentury. The change was so dramatic that the 1945 to 2000+ period has been called the Great Acceleration

What finally triggered the Great Acceleration after the end of World War II? This war undoubtedly drove the final collapse of the remaining pre-industrial European institutions that contributed to the depression and, indeed, to the Great War itself. But many other factors also played an important role [55,61]. New international institutions—the so-called Bretton Woods institutions—were formed to aid economic recovery and fuel renewed economic growth. Led by the USA, the world moved towards a system built around neo-liberal economic principles, characterized by more open trade and capital flows. The post-World War II economy integrated rapidly, with growth rates reaching their highest values ever in the 1950–1973 period.

Industrial production expanded by only 3.1% year-on-year in September,

The causes of the coal shortage fall into two categories: structural and incidental. The unlucky contingencies include floods in Henan province in July and in Shanxi this month, which forced some mines to close. In addition, in Inner Mongolia, which accounts for about a quarter of China’s coal output, an investigation into corruption has implicated and hamstrung some of the officials who might previously have approved expansions in coal mining. Shaanxi province, China’s third-largest producer of coal, slowed production to keep the skies clear for a national athletics event in September

When supply is tight, prices are supposed to rise, obliging customers to economise on their consumption. But as the price of coal shot up, power stations were unable to pass their higher costs on.

In a press conference on October 15th, China’s central bank described Evergrande as an idiosyncratic case in a generally healthy industry. That should have been reassuring, except that policymakers will not come to the property sector’s rescue until they are sufficiently worried about its plight.

property sector, a perennial engine of growth, employment, leverage and anxiety

Regulators are trying to curb speculative demand for flats and limit the excessive borrowing of homebuilders. That effort to limit financial risk has brought some pre-existing dangers to a head

Some homebuyers are now understandably nervous about handing over their cash to any developer who may not be in business long enough to finish the projects they are selling.

Another shock to the economy came from the pandemic. Outbreaks of covid-19, such as a cluster that began in Nanjing in July, prompted strict, localised lockdowns, depressing retail spending, especially catering, and travel.

Most economists think China’s year-on-year growth will slow even further in the last three months of the year, to 4% or below. China will maintain its vigilance against covid-19, and the property downturn has further to run.

these documents define the American social compact—the mutual responsibilities of citizen and state—that define the American experiment.

Here’s the first pair, from the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The first sentence recognizes the inherent dignity of man as human beings created in the image of God. The second sentence, nearly as important, recognizes the unavoidable duty of government to recognize and protect that dignity. While the sole purpose of government isn’t to protect liberty, a government that fails to protect liberty fails in an essential function. 

Adams wrote to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts to outline the responsibilities of the citizens of the new republic.

The letter contains the famous declaration that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But I’m more interested in the two preceding sentences:

Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.

Put in plain English, this means that when public virtue fails, our constitutional government does not possess the power to preserve itself.

the American experiment depends upon both the government upholding its obligation to preserve liberty and the American people upholding theirs to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. 

Citizen and state both have obligations, and if either side fails, it imperils the republic.

We see this reality play out in American history.

The seeds for the first great American crisis were sown in the original Constitution itself. By failing to end slavery and by failing to extend the Bill of Rights to protect citizens from the oppression of state and local governments, the early American government flatly failed to live up to the principles of the Declaration, and we paid the price in blood.

our nation seethes again today

The response to John Adams’s warning is not to arm the government with more power but to equip citizens with more virtue.

Its politics are gripped by deep hatred and abiding animosity, and its culture groans under the weight of human despair. Hatred rules our politics; anxiety, depression, and loneliness dominate our culture.

Those many cultural critics who look at the United States of America and declare that “something is wrong” are exactly right

here’s the difference—unlike the days when we could point to a specific source of government oppression, such as slavery or Jim Crow, the American government (though highly imperfect) currently protects individual liberty and associational freedoms to a degree we’ve never seen in American history.

Even after the Civil War, the quick end of Union occupation of the Confederacy enabled the creation of an apartheid substate in the South. Once again, the government failed to live up the core principles of the founding. It is by God’s grace that the Jim Crow regime ended primarily as the result of one of the Civil Rights Movement—one of the great Christian justice movements in history—and not as the result of another convulsive civil conflict.

But what can the government do about friendlessness? About anxiety? What can the government do to make sure that we are not—in Robert Putnam’s memorable phrase—“bowling alone?

that challenge is compounded by the fact that the most engaged American citizens are its most angry partisans.

And if you think that most-partisan cohort is seething with anger because they suffer from painful oppression, think again. The data is clear. As the More in Common project notes, the most polarized Americans are disproportionately white and college-educated on the left and disproportionately white and retired on the right. 

The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived.

They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.

It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.

maybe it’s not so astonishing, because accumulating wealth and power is not and never was the path to meaning and purpose.

much of both the right and left postliberal impulse is related to the first of John Adams’s two key sentences. If we don’t have a government “armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” then their solution is to increase the power of government. Arm it with more power. 

But when it comes to government, you’re never arming an “it,” you’re arming a “them”—a collection of human beings who suffer from all the same character defects and cultural maladies as the rest of us

As James Madison observed in Federalist 51 (the second-best Federalist Paper), “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Yet American postliberalism asks us to empower men and women who frequently don’t even pretend to be virtuous, who often glory in their vice, all for the “common good.” 

We still battle the legacy of past injustice and the present reality of lingering discrimination, but there’s just no comparison between the legal systems that destabilized America and the legal systems that exist today. 

how do we do that? The path past animosity and against despair can be as short and simple as the path from Twitter to the kitchen table

It’s shifting the focus from the infuriating thing you can’t control to the people you can love, to the institutions you can build.

in this present time, thanks to the steadily-expanding sphere of American liberty, we have more ability to unite—including for religious purposes—than at any time in American history. Yet we still bowl alone. We tweet alone. We rage alone, staring at screens and forming online tribes that provide an empty simulacrum of real relationships.

for all too many of us that feels empty, like our small actions are simply inadequate to address the giant concerns that dominate our minds

To do the big thing—to heal our land—we have to do the small things.

We need a frame shift. Do not think of doing the small things as abandoning the larger quest. See every family, every friendship, every healthy church, every functioning school board as indispensable to our continued American experiment. 

For those who think and obsess about politics, this shift from big to small is hard. It’s hard to think that how you love your friends might be more important to our nation than what you think of CRT

When our crisis is one of hatred, anxiety, and despair, don’t look to politics to heal our hearts. Our government can’t contend with “human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion.” Our social fabric is fraying. The social compact is crumbling. Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame. 

It’s easy to take the zipper for granted today, but before it was invented, getting (and staying) dressed involved securing clothing with ropes, ties, buttons or other fasteners.

After years of attempts, Bell achieved his goal of transmitting sound over a wire, and on March 7, 1876, obtained his first U.S. Patent for a device he labeled as “Improvement on Telegraphy”—now better known as the telephone.

The first World’s Fair to take place in the United States was held in Philadelphia in 1876, and also celebrated the 100th anniversary of the country’s founding.

Then, in 1893, inventor Whitcomb L. Judson received a patent for his “clasp locker” shoe fastener, and immediately partnered with businessman Colonel Lewis Walker to launch the Universal Fastener Company and manufacture his invention

Along with the zipper, the Garis-Cochran Dishwashing Machine was also first introduced to the public at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, in a display drawing crowds curious about the contraption capable of thoroughly washing and drying 240 dishes in two minutes. The crowd-pleasing exhibit was more than a decade in the making. In 1883, Ohio entrepreneur Josephine Garis Cochran grew frustrated with the amount of time it took to clean up after dinner parties, reportedly saying, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself.” And she did.

One of the biggest challenges that arose during the early days of electricity was getting it from the power source to an individual device. By the 1880s, entire houses were being wired for electricity, but electrical appliances had to be connected to the home’s main power source directly, posing serious safety risks to members of the household.

April 30, 1939, New York City: This is the scene viewed on the television receivers in the metropolitan area, as the National Broadcasting Company inaugurated the first regular television service to the American public telecasting the ceremonies marking the opening of the New York World's Fair. Bettmann via Getty Images

May 1, 1939 saw another television milestone: the launch of a regular television broadcast schedule on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which was owned by RCA.

Fairgoers could take what was advertised as “America’s first television tour” (presented by NBC), where they would learn about the history of the medium, as well as the science and engineering that made its broadcast possible.

In the age of smartphones, it’s easy to identify the touchscreen demonstration at the World’s Fair as a significant technological turning point, but according to Jack Neely, executive director of the Knoxville History Project and crowd controller at the World’s Fair, that wasn’t apparent at the time. “It was...one of those things you had to look fast to notice,” Neely told the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon in a 2017 interview.

Among Latino, Black and Native American households, more than 50% had serious financial problems, while 29% of white households did.

19% of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 crisis and currently having no savings to fall back on.

31% reported losing all their savings. And among Latino and Native American families, just over a quarter of households report they depleted their savings.

53% of Houston renters reporting trouble paying rent.

Half of households report at least one person in the home has had serious problems with depression, anxiety, stress or sleep in recent months.

More than two-thirds of American households with children in K-12 last school year said their children fell behind in their learning because of the COVID-19 outbreak. This includes 36% who said children "fell behind a lot."

A quarter of Asian American adults say that in the past few months they have feared someone might threaten or physically attack them or members of their household because of their race/ethnicity. The proportion of Native Americans fearing threats and attacks was 22%, and for Black households it was 21%

'Oh my gosh, I have kids, I have family, my wife is from Taiwan and I'm fearful for them,' " he says.

Our poll found that among the 1 in 5 households reporting a problem getting care for a serious medical condition, 76% of those reported that there was a negative health consequence as a result.

It was still very unclear, however, what form this revolution would take. Over the next several years, Lincoln considered ideas about how to welcome the devastated South back into the Union, but as the war drew to a close in early 1865, he still had no clear plan. 

In a speech delivered on April 11, while referring to plans for Reconstruction in Louisiana, Lincoln proposed that some Black people–including free Black people and those who had enlisted in the military–deserved the right to vote. He was assassinated three days later, however, and it would fall to his successor to put plans for Reconstruction in place.

Under Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction, all land that had been confiscated by the Union Army and distributed to the formerly enslaved people by the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau (established by Congress in 1865) reverted to its prewar owners.

When Democrats waged a campaign of violence to take control of Mississippi in 1875, Grant refused to send federal troops, marking the end of federal support for Reconstruction-era state governments in the South. By 1876, only Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina were still in Republican hands. In the contested presidential election that year, Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes reached a compromise with Democrats in Congress: In exchange for certification of his election, he acknowledged Democratic control of the entire South. 

fter Johnson vetoed the bills–causing a permanent rupture in his relationship with Congress that would culminate in his impeachment in 1868–the Civil Rights Act became the first major bill to become law over presidential veto.

The following March, again over Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which temporarily divided the South into five military districts and outlined how governments based on universal (male) suffrage were to be organized.

By 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been admitted to the Union, and the state constitutions during the years of Radical Reconstruction were the most progressive in the region’s history. The participation of African Americans in southern public life after 1867 would be by far the most radical development of Reconstruction, which was essentially a large-scale experiment in interracial democracy unlike that of any other society following the abolition of slavery. 

After 1867, an increasing number of southern whites turned to violence in response to the revolutionary changes of Radical Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations targeted local Republican leaders, white and Black, and other African Americans who challenged white authority. Though federal legislation passed during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 took aim at the Klan and others who attempted to interfere with Black suffrage and other political rights, white supremacy gradually reasserted its hold on the South after the early 1870s as support for Reconstruction waned. Racism was still a potent force in both South and North, and Republicans became more conservative and less egalitarian as the decade continued. In 1874—after an economic depression plunged much of the South into poverty—the Democratic Party won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the Civil War.

These repressive codes enraged many in the North, including numerous members of Congress, which refused to seat congressmen and senators elected from the southern states. 

A century later, the legacy of Reconstruction would be revived during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as African Americans fought for the political, economic and social equality that had long been denied them.

Teachers are facing a rising tide of disruptive behavior.

“Hate Crime Reports in U.S. Surge to the Highest Level in 12 Years, F.B.I. Says.” The F.B.I. found that between 2019 and 2020 the number of attacks targeting Black people, for example, rose to 2,871 from 1,972.

The number of gun purchases has soared. In January 2021, more than two million firearms were bought, The Washington Post reported, “an 80 percent year-over-year spike and the third-highest one-month total on record.”

As Americans’ hostility toward one another seems to be growing, their care for one another seems to be falling.

the share of Americans who give to charity is steadily declining. In 2000, 66.2 percent of households made a charitable donation. But by 2018 only 49.6 percent did.

now the college students I know fear that one errant sentence could lead to social death. That’s a monumental sea change.

not every trend is bad.

Substance use among teenagers, for example, seems to be declining.

t something darker and deeper seems to be happening as well — a long-term loss of solidarity, a long-term rise in estrangement and hostility.

This is what it feels like to live in a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down.

What the hell is going on? The short answer: I don’t know.

I also don’t know what’s causing the high rates of depression, suicide and loneliness that dogged Americans even before the pandemic and that are the sad flip side of all the hostility and recklessness I’ve just described.

We can round up the usual suspects: social media, rotten politics. When President Donald Trump signaled it was OK to hate marginalized groups, a lot of people were bound to see that as permission.

the fraying of the social fabric. Last year, Gallup had a report titled, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.”

“America Is a Nation of Narcissists, According to Two New Studies.”

there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this. Over the past several years, and over a wide range of different behaviors, Americans have been acting in fewer pro-social and relational ways and in more antisocial and self-destructive ways. But why?

This is a problem for governance and for democracy. People with exceedingly low levels of trust are often disposed to favor authoritarian, right-wing parties; embrace conspiracy theories; and feel victimized by outsiders.

So how does one rationalize with and govern a society with low trust, getting lower with each crisis? Democracy in the United States and Europe might depend on solving that quandary.

Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.

“climate change might not necessarily increase mental health issues because people might adapt over time, meaning that higher temperatures could become normal and not be experienced as anomalous or extreme.”

yes. Before the media began reporting on putative temperature records—the scientific evidence for which is also weak—heat waves were treated as a normal part of summer. Uncomfortable, but figuratively nothing to sweat about.

according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.

A study in 2021 of 16- to 25-year-olds in 10 countries including the U.S. reported that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried

The Bloomberg article cites a July meta-analysis in the medical journal Lancet, which found a tenuous link between higher temperatures and suicides and mental illness. But the study deems the collective evidence of “low certainty” owing to inconsistent study findings, methodologies, measured variables and definitions.

Displacement is a maladaptive mechanism by which people redirect negative emotions from one thing to another

These anxieties are no more rational than the threats from climate change are existential.

A more apt term for such fear is climate hypochondria.

The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis

Ms. Tolentino goes on to describe how climate therapists can help patients cope. “The goal is not to resolve the intrusive feeling and put it away” but, as one therapist advises her, “to aim for a middle ground of sustainable distress.” Even the climate left’s despair must be “sustainable.”

there’s nothing normal about climate anxiety, despite the left’s claims to the contrary.

Progressives may even use climate change to displace their other anxieties—for instance, about having children

“First and foremost, it is imperative that adults understand that youth climate anxiety (also referred to as eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eco-guilt or ecological grief) is an emotionally and cognitively functional response to real existential threats,” a May 10 editorial in the journal Nature explained. “Although feelings of powerlessness, grief and fear can be profoundly disruptive—particularly for young people unaccustomed to the depth and complexity of such feelings—it is important to acknowledge that this response is a rational one.”

Climate hypochondriacs deserve to be treated with compassion, much like anyone who suffers from mental illness. They shouldn’t, however, expect everyone else to enable their neuroses.

Men now receive about 74 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 awarded to women, and men account for more than 70 percent of the decline in college enrollment overall

In 2020, nearly half of women reported in a TD Ameritrade survey that they out-earn or make the same amount as their husbands or partners — a huge jump from fewer than 4 percent of women in 1960.

women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner.

Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.

In my opinion, Peterson served up fairly banal advice: “Stand up straight,” “delay gratification.” His evolutionary-biology-informed takes ranged from amusingly weird to mildly insulting.

Women are still dealing with historical discrimination and centuries of male domination that haven’t been fully accounted for or rectified. Are we really worrying that men feel a little emasculated because their female classmates are doing well?

But millions of men lack access to that kind of power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious and directionless.

It seems like there’s been a breakdown, right? But there’s a very real way in which, at this moment, a lot of guys don’t know — they have no sense of what it means to be them, particularly. They have no idea what it means to be a man.”

Past models of masculinity feel unreachable or socially unacceptable; new ones have yet to crystallize. What are men for in the modern world? What do they look like? Where do they fit

Only one group seems to have no such doubts about offering men a plan.

an entire academic discipline emerged to theorize about gender and excavate women’s history — there hasn’t been a corresponding conversation about what role men should play in a changing world. At the same time, the increasing visibility of the LGBTQ+ movement has made the gender dynamic seem less stable, less defined.

went to that 2018 Peterson appearance as a skeptic. But his appeal — along with that of his fellow “manfluencers” — has become clearer since

Technically, men are slightly in the minority in the United States. But apart from that, Bray had a point — and what he said explained a lot about why the left and the mainstream are losing men.

What’s notable, first, is their empathy. For all Peterson’s barking and, lately, unhinged tweeting, he’s clearly on young men’s side.

This is especially compelling in a moment when many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don’t feel part of. For young men in particular, the assumption of a world built to serve their sex doesn’t align with their lived experience, where girls out-achieve them from pre-K to post-graduate studies and “men are trash” is an acceptable joke.

Then there’s the point-by-point advice. If young men are looking for direction, these influencers give them a clear script to follow — hours of video, thousands of book pages, a torrent of social media posts — in a moment when uncertainty abounds

if instruction is lacking elsewhere, even basic tips (“Clean your room!” Peterson famously advises) feel like a revelation. Plus, the community that comes with joining a fandom can feel like a buffer against an increasingly atomized world.

As one therapist told me: “I have used Jordan Peterson to turn a boy into a man. I used him to turn this guy without a strong father figure into someone who, yes, makes his bed and stands up straight and now is successful.” The books, she said, “do provide a structure that was clearly missing.”

It’s also important that the approach of these male models is both particular and aspirational. The BAPs and Hawleys find ways to celebrate aspects of the male experience — from physical strength to competitiveness to sex as a motivator — that other parts of modern society have either derided as “toxic” or attempted to explain aren’t specific to men at al

the 20-something guy in front of me swung around. “Jordan Peterson,” he told me without a hint of irony in his voice, “taught me how to live.”

the fact that they’re willing to define it outright feels bravely countercultural.

A baby-faced, 19-year-old University of Florida freshman with short, white-blond hair, Bray was wearing a hoodie despite the heat. (He grew up in Sarasota, so he was used to it.) He had agreed to talk to me about how he saw uncertainties about masculinity playing out on his campus.

First, he laid out his liberal, Gen Z bona fides — he’s in a fraternity, but many of his close friends are LGBTQ+. He feels that old versions of masculinity might be dissolving for the better.

But then he got candid. He doesn’t really identify with the manosphere, he told me, but can understand why others might. “I feel like there’s a lot of room to be proudly feminine, but there’s not, in my opinion, the same room to be proudly masculine.”

Men were constantly told to be “better” and less “toxic,” he said, but what that “better” might look like seemed hard to pin down. “You pretty much have to figure it out yourself. But yet society still has the expectation that, you know, you have to be a certain way.

Then he turned wistful. “I don’t feel like men in general have the same types of role models that women do, even in their own personal lives. … Just because you’re in the majority doesn’t mean you don’t need support.”

At their best, these influencers highlight positive traits that were traditionally associated with maleness — protectiveness, leadership, emotional stability — and encourage them, making “masculinity” out to be a real and necessary thing, and its acquisition something honorable and desirable

Even today, some progressives react touchily to any efforts to help men as a group.

In the conversations I had with men for this essay, I kept hearing that many would still find some kind of normative standard of masculinity meaningful and useful, if only to give them a starting point from which to expand.

The strategist described his party as having almost an allergy to admitting that some men might, in fact, be struggling in a unique way and could benefit from their own tailored attention and aid

when you strip out the specificity, people feel less seen,” he said. “There’s less of a resonance. If the question is what scripts we have for men, how are we appealing to men, then being willing and able to talk about men is a pretty key component of that.”

To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight

I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.

Take Richard Reeves’s book “Of Boys and Men,” omnipresent in the discourse since its 2022 release.

even he acknowledges he has felt pressure to shy away from some of the harder questions his subject matter raises.

Reeves told me that in his writing, he tried to stay descriptive, only going so far as saying there are some differences between the sexes that need to be taken into account to create the most viable solutions. He frames the biological differences between the sexes not as a binary but as overlapping distributions of traits — aggression, risk appetite, sex drive — with clusters of one sex or the other at the extremes.

But when it came to writing any kind of script for how men should be, the self-possessed expert scholar faltered.

“That’s a question I basically dodged in the book,” Reeves told me. “Because, candidly, it’s outside of my comfort zone. It’s more personal. It’s harder to empirically justify. There are no charts I can brandish.” After all, as he said, he’s a think-tank guy, a wonk.

“But I think I’m now trying to articulate more prescriptively, less descriptively, some of these discussions about masculinity and trying to send some messages around it” — here, his speech became emphatic — “because, honestly, nobody else is f---ing doing it except the right.”

“As soon as you start articulating virtues, advantages, good things about being male … then you’ve just dialed up the risk factor of the conversation,” he said. “But I’m also acutely aware that the risk of not doing it is much greater. Because without it, there’s a vacuum. And along comes Andrew Tate to make Jordan Peterson look like a cuddly old uncle.”

many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be

As a result, there’s a temptation to minimize men’s problems or erase references to masculinity altogether.

“I mean, there are certain attributes around masculinity that we should embrace. Men think about sex more than women. Use that as motivation to be successful and meet women. Men are more impulsive. Men will run out into a field and get shot up to think they’re saving their buddies.”

He was careful to point out that he doesn’t believe that women wouldn’t do as much but that the distributions are different.

“Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.”I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.

so men should think, ‘I want to take advantage of my maleness. I want to be aggressive, I want to set goals, go hard at it. I want to be physically really strong. I want to take care of myself.’”

“My view is that, for masculinity, a decent place to start is garnering the skills and strength that you can advocate for and protect others with. If you’re really strong and smart, you will garner enough power, influence, kindness to begin protecting others. That is it. Full stop. Real men protect other people.

Reeves, in our earlier conversation, had put it somewhat more subtl

His recipe for masculine success echoed Galloway’s: proactiveness, agency, risk-taking and courage, but with a pro-social cast

many young men I spoke with would describe as aspirational, once they finally felt safe enough to admit they did in fact carry an ideal of manhood with its own particular features.

Physical strength came up frequently, as did a desire for personal mastery. They cited adventurousness, leadership, problem-solving, dignity and sexual drive. None of these are negative traits, but many men I spoke with felt that these archetypes were unfairly stigmatized: Men were too assertive, too boisterous, too horny.

in fact, most of these features are scaffolded by biology — all are associated with testosterone, the male sex hormone. It’s not an excuse for “boys will be boys”-style bad behavior, but, realistically, these traits would be better acknowledged and harnessed for pro-social aims than stifled or downplayed

despite a push by some advocates to make everything from bathrooms to birthing gender-neutral, most people don’t actually want a completely androgynous society. And if a new model for masculinity is going to find popular appeal, it will depend on putting the distinctiveness of men to good use in whatever form it comes.

“Femininity or masculinity are a social construct that we get to define,” Galloway concluded. “They are, loosely speaking, behaviors we associate with people born as men or born as women, or attributes more common among people born as men or as women. But the key is that we still get to fill that vessel and define what those attributes are, and then try and reinforce them with our behavior and our views and our media.”

What would creating a positive vision of masculinity look like? Recognizing distinctiveness but not pathologizing it. Finding new ways to valorize it and tell a story that is appealing to young men and socially beneficial, rather than ceding ground to those who would warp a perceived difference into something ugly and destructive.

more than 20 years ago, anthropologist David D. Gilmore published “Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity,” a cross-cultural study of manliness around the world. He found that almost all societies had a concept of “real,” “true” or “adult” manhood that was seen as a valuable and indispensable ideal. But masculinity had to be earned — and proved

Men achieved it by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating

all three of these goals seem less celebrated and further from reach. Young men who disappear into online forums, video games or pornography see none of the social or personal rewards of meeting these goals, and their loneliness and despair suggest how painful it has been to lose track of this ideal.

The other feature of Gilmore’s findings was that boys generally had to be ushered into manhood and masculinity by other men. And that seems to be a key link missing today.

“When I talk to my friends, I can literally count on one hand the number of friends I have who have a good relationship with their dad and actually have learned things from him,

Many of the young men I talked to for this essay told me they had troubled relationships with their fathers, or no father figure in their lives at all. The data bear this out: Since 1960, the percentage of boys living apart from their biological fathers has nearly doubled, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

“If you’re growing up in a single-parent household, and you go to a typical public school and typical medical system, there’s a decent chance that you will not encounter a male figure of authority until middle school or later. Not your doctor, not your teachers. No one else around you. What does that feel like?”

In 2018, Harvard economist Raj Chetty published a groundbreaking study on race and economic opportunity. Among the findings was that persistent income inequality between Black and White people was disproportionately driven by poor outcomes among Black boys.

those boys who grew up in neighborhoods where there were more fathers present — even if not their own — had significantly higher chances of upward mobility.

“Ultimately,” Reynolds mused, “it’s about relationships and finding older men who, you know — they’re not flashy, they’re not ‘important,’ necessarily, but they actually are living virtuous lives as men. And then being able to then learn from them.”

fostering positive representations of manhood requires relationships and mentorship on an individual level in a way that can’t be mandated.

nearly every thinker on the masculinity problem advocates getting more men into classrooms, from kindergarten up — not just for their effects as teachers but also because they’re more likely to serve as coaches, especially of boys’ sports.

the change will need to come from the bottom up — from everyday men who notice the crisis of identity hitting their younger counterparts and can put themselves forward to help. “Ninety percent of this, if not 95, is on us, is on older men, is on society,”

We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.

For the left, there’s room to elaborate on visions of these qualities that are expansive, not reductive, that allow for many varieties of masculinity and don’t deny female value and agency.

In my ideal, the mainstream could embrace a model that acknowledges male particularity and difference but doesn’t denigrate women to do so. It’s a vision of gender that’s not androgynous but still equal, and relies on character, not just biology

it acknowledges that certain themes — protector, provider, even procreator — still resonate with many men and should be worked with, not against.

it will be slow. A new masculinity will be a norm shift, and that takes time.

empathy will be required, as grating as that might feel.

“My experience in those four months was the worst experience I’ve ever had in working in a company,” Alex Kairu, one of the Kenya workers, said in an interview.

OpenAI marshaled a sprawling global pipeline of specialized human labor for over two years to enable its most cutting-edge AI technologies to exist, the documents show

“It’s something that needs to get done,” Sears said. “It’s just so unbelievably ugly.”

eviewing toxic content goes hand-in-hand with the less objectionable work to make systems like ChatGPT usable.

The work done for OpenAI is even more vital to the product because it is seeking to prevent the company’s own software from pumping out unacceptable content, AI experts say.

Sears said CloudFactory determined there was no way to do the work without harming its workers and decided not to accept such projects.

companies could soon spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to provide AI systems with human feedback. Others estimate that companies are already investing between millions and tens of millions of dollars on it annually. OpenAI said it hired more than 1,000 workers for this purpose.

Another layer of human input asks workers to rate different answers from a chatbot to the same question for which is least problematic or most factually accurate. In response to a question asking how to build a homemade bomb, for example, OpenAI instructs workers to upvote the answer that declines to respond, according to OpenAI research. The chatbot learns to internalize the behavior through multiple rounds of feedback. 

A spokeswoman for Sama, the San Francisco-based outsourcing company that hired the Kenyan workers, said the work with OpenAI began in November 2021. She said the firm terminated the contract in March 2022 when Sama’s leadership became aware of concerns surrounding the nature of the project and has since exited content moderation completely.

OpenAI also hires outside experts to provoke its model to produce harmful content, a practice called “red-teaming” that helps the company find other gaps in its system.

At first, the texts were no more than two sentences. Over time, they grew to as much as five or six paragraphs. A few weeks in, Mathenge and Bill Mulinya, another team leader, began to notice the strain on their teams. Workers began taking sick and family leaves with increasing frequency, they said.

The tasks that the Kenya-based workers performed to produce the final safety check on ChatGPT’s outputs were yet a fourth layer of human input. It was often psychologically taxing. Several of the Kenya workers said they have grappled with mental illness and that their relationships and families have suffered. Some struggle to continue to work.

On July 11, some of the OpenAI workers lodged a petition with the Kenyan parliament urging new legislation to protect AI workers and content moderators. They also called for Kenya’s existing laws to be amended to recognize that being exposed to harmful content is an occupational hazard

Mercy Mutemi, a lawyer and managing partner at Nzili & Sumbi Advocates who is representing the workers, said despite their critical contributions, OpenAI and Sama exploited their poverty as well as the gaps in Kenya’s legal framework. The workers on the project were paid on average between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokeswoman.

The Sama spokeswoman said the workers engaged in the OpenAI project volunteered to take on the work and were paid according to an internationally recognized methodology for determining a living wage. The contract stated that the fee was meant to cover others not directly involved in the work, including project managers and psychological counselors.

Kenya has become a hub for many tech companies seeking content moderation and AI workers because of its high levels of education and English literacy and the low wages associated with deep poverty.

Some Kenya-based workers are suing Meta’s Facebook after nearly 200 workers say they were traumatized by work requiring them to review videos and images of rapes, beheadings and suicides.

A Kenyan court ruled in June that Meta was legally responsible for the treatment of its contract workers, setting the stage for a shift in the ground rules that tech companies including AI firms will need to abide by to outsource projects to workers in the future.

OpenAI signed a one-year contract with Sama to start work in November 2021. At the time, mid-pandemic, many workers viewed having any work as a miracle, said Richard Mathenge, a team leader on the OpenAI project for Sama and a cosigner of the petition.

OpenAI researchers would review the text passages and send them to Sama in batches for the workers to label one by one. That text came from a mix of sources, according to an OpenAI research paper: public data sets of toxic content compiled and shared by academics, posts scraped from social media and internet forums such as Reddit and content generated by prompting an AI model to produce harmful outputs. 

The generated outputs were necessary, the paper said, to have enough examples of the kind of graphic violence that its AI systems needed to avoid. In one case, OpenAI researchers asked the model to produce an online forum post of a teenage girl whose friend had enacted self-harm, the paper said.

OpenAI asked the workers to parse text-based sexual content into four categories of severity, documents show. The worst was descriptions of child sexual-abuse material, or C4. The C3 category included incest, bestiality, rape, sexual trafficking and sexual slavery—sexual content that could be illegal if performed in real life.

Jason Kwon, general counsel at OpenAI, said in an interview that such work was really valuable and important for making the company’s systems safe for everyone that uses them. It allows the systems to actually exist in the world, he said, and provides benefits to users.

Working on the violent-content team, Kairu said, he read hundreds of posts a day, sometimes describing heinous acts, such as people stabbing themselves with a fork or using unspeakable methods to kill themselves

He began to have nightmares. Once affable and social, he grew socially isolated, he said. To this day he distrusts strangers. When he sees a fork, he sees a weapon.

Mophat Okinyi, a quality analyst, said his work included having to read detailed paragraphs about parents raping their children and children having sex with animals. He worked on a team that reviewed sexual content, which was contracted to handle 15,000 posts a month, according to the documents. His six months on the project tore apart his family, he said, and left him with trauma, anxiety and depression.

In March 2022, management told staffers the project would end earlier than planned. The Sama spokeswoman said the change was due to a dispute with OpenAI over one part of the project that involved handling images. The company canceled all contracts with OpenAI and didn’t earn the full $230,000 that had been estimated for the four projects, she said.

Several months after the project ended, Okinyi came home one night with fish for dinner for his wife, who was pregnant, and stepdaughter. He discovered them gone and a message from his wife that she’d left, he said.“She said, ‘You’ve changed. You’re not the man I married. I don’t understand you anymore,’” he said.

In Mexico, the growing interest in all things Korean has made her a social-media sensation with more than 24 million followers on TikTok and over eight million subscribers to her YouTube channel, allowing her to gain popularity, financial stability and a romantic partner — all on her own terms.

“She had all this training in Korea, in this new Korea that allows her to land in a place like Mexico and be successful.”

A sort of a teacher of comparative pop culture, Ms. Kim offers lessons on popular Korean soap operas, lyrics, fashion standards, traditions and social norms. She once worked as a waitress in Mexico for a day and posted about her confusion with tips. (South Korea is a no-tip country.) She showed followers how Korean students crammed for exams. She started traveling across Mexico tasting regional delicacies.

Ms. Kim’s success tracks the growth of Korean influence in Mexico and the region.More than 2,000 Korean companies have a presence in Mexico, part of a so-called near-shoring strategy that has driven larger corporations — Kia, LG, Samsung, Hyundai, among others — to take advantage of a free-trade agreement with Canada and the United States.

K-pop, K-beauty and K-dramas have shown Latin Americans a new, different way to be cool.

K-pop bands have been performing to increasingly bigger and sold-out venues since 2012. This year, a summer festival will bring 16 Korean groups to Mexico City, with ticket prices starting at around $170.

Some newsstands specialize in magazines, posters and merchandise about South Korean celebrities. Netflix offers dubbing in “Latin Spanish” for Korean shows. Movie theaters stream live K-pop concerts performed abroad.

After finishing college in South Korea, Ms. Kim said she experienced severe stress. “I wanted to die and I wished to rest,” she said in one of her most popular videos. She has spoken openly about being hospitalized to take care of her mental health.

She attributes her exhaustion to Korea’s culture of sacrifice and grind that helped the country become an economic powerhouse after the Korean War.

“Everything is quick, quick, now, right this second,” Dr. Balderrama said. “This created a culture where there’s no place for mediocrity, there’s no place for those unwilling to compete.”

In Mexico, Ms. Kim hoped to find a more joyous life: “I saw how Latin culture is, how Latin people live and they’re living happily,” she said. “I don’t want to waste a single moment I’m in Latin America because it’s so precious to me.”

But if Ms. Kim has found a passion and a business, she has not completely found the peace of mind she was seeking. She’s in therapy to deal with what she described as some depression and anxiety.

Her large following and popularity has bred fear: “I feel people will forget me, that nobody will like me,” she said, worried about the toll of having to come up with creative content to remain relevant.

She does get criticized online by users who say she should go back to Korea, who ask whether she pays taxes in Mexico (she says she does) and who consider her another foreigner lured by life on the cheap and who contributes to the gentrification of parts of the country at the expense of Mexican residents.

Should they pivot further right themselves and risk their centrist identity? Should they continue to try to isolate the AfD? Or, as that becomes increasingly difficult, should they break longstanding norms and work with the AfD instead?

For now, the AfD has the political winds at its back. Germany’s support for Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s invasion — and the energy and refugee crises the war has provoked — has fueled German anxiety and, along with it, support for the AfD.

And whereas Ms. Merkel famously declared “We can do it!” at the peak of Europe’s immigration crisis in 2015, Mr. Merz has adopted a more hawkish tone.

“This together, in my opinion, forces the C.D.U. to answer the question: What is your DNA? What is your different perspective?”

Some political experts view the resurgence of the AfD as a rejection of Ms. Merkel’s policies — particularly her immigration and climate-friendly stances. That has created a particularly awkward situation for current members of the party.

Much of the party’s angst has been channeled into pummeling the climate-friendly Greens, a part of Chancellor Scholz’s governing coalition. Conservatives blame the Greens for stoking anti-Berlin sentiment in the more rural, economically depressed areas where the AfD enjoys strong support.

“The C.D.U., its more moderate worldview and its moderate position is not really equipped for the situation of this time, when we are having a war, when we have in the energy crisis, with high costs and now with a government which tries to ideologically influence people’s lives,” Mr. Voigt, the leader of the C.D.U. in Thuringia’s state parliament, said.

“The refugee crisis is present again, combined with the uneasy feeling that there is always enough money for refugees, but less and less for kindergartens, schools and hospitals,” he wrote in a recent edition of his newsletter, explaining the rise of the AfD.

Jan Redmann, the party leader in Brandenburg, said in an interview that he believed that C.D.U. members had inadvertently allowed the AfD to define their positions on crucial issues like immigration, because they “tried not to be mixed up with” the far-right party.

The big picture for both sexes is clear: A serious deterioration in the mental health of young people in 2019 to 2023 compared with the baseline of 1993 to 2018.

why? Blanchflower said the mental health of 20-somethings began to deteriorate noticeably around 2011. That made some sense because the United States was in a jobless recovery; the high unemployment rate made it hard for young people to find good jobs — or any jobs

He said he doesn’t fully understand why things continued to worsen as the job market strengthened. But he said, confirming others’ research, that the Covid lockdown was a fresh blow to young people’s mental health. Immersion in social media is another popular explanation,

Stoics are making a comeback—and they have been for several years. From discussions among Silicon Valley elites to podcasts and newsletters, the school of thought that once flourished in ancient Greece and Rome has been seeing a revival in recent years. The pandemic supercharged this.

men react poorly to loss of status. A 2005 study by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne found that men who experience downward mobility are four times more likely to suffer from depression—and although women are twice as likely to be downwardly mobile, they don’t experience the same drop in well-being.

Today’s backlash against diversity and inclusion efforts can also be seen through this lens: a third leg of men’s status being chopped off.

The Roman Empire did not invent the patriarchy—but it did codify it into law. Pater familias was a legal status that gave the patriarch authority over the family and its estate, two status-granting privileges that contemporary men took for granted but may never achieve

The Roman legal concept of bonus pater familias, or diligens pater familias, became the benchmark for reasonable and diligent behavior when courts seek to establish negligence, from Spain to Canada.

Status (and gender) no longer mattered. What matters is the behavior: Is it that of a proverbial good family father? This has become a stand-in for the standard of care required, underpinning how we may not all think of the Roman Empire all that often, but it’s all around us.

In an age of crises, competence commands a premium—but what we’re getting instead is misogyny, anger, and poor mental health

no wonder that men are vocally demanding to spend more time with their families—perhaps the most potent cure to these struggles.

Today, men are craving answers, purpose, and family. If that’s unachievable, we can expect much worse than fantasies about bygone empires.